Posted 5:29 PM by Gene

In a pawn shop on South Street I regularly visit to pay homage to the electronics of the past I came across a remarkable document from SUMNER: The CBS Evening News Report. Yes, it's a "report" about the "news." You'd figure a TV news show should speak for itself; why does it need a PR handout? And this one it got, handed out on trains, I presume, by the local SUMNER station, to explain what Lucy Van Pelt does every evening, aside from being perky at 50. These bromides could laze comfortably in Reader's Digest, stories that assure us their well-paid newsfaces report important stuff every evening. Lucy spends two pages saying what a swell guy Michael J. Fox is. No doubt he is. But why should Lucy tell me what a swell guy he is when she ought to be doing more with her 22 minutes of air time? And here, in a nutshell, is why the evening news serves no useful purpose. It's merely a platform for faces and denture-cleaner ads. And it's also something worse. On the back cover is a picture of SUMNER's two local anchorpoops, who came from Minnesota or Nevada or wherever, lucky for their faces and voices, who could be replaced next year or next week, and no one would care. ("We love this city", says the heading, without a hint of irony. The lady wears an ankle tattoo, which in the local-news world is enough to make her "different", we guess.) But they, like their fellow pearly teeth, have a dream. I am now convinced one reason the nightly news is living through such a long senescence is because of the job our Mr. If-It-Bleeds-It-Leads has done as a lead-in not only for the late Peter Jennings but for Wink Martindale and then for Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak following; they owe their jobs in no small measure to him. The notion of the 'dos as carnival barkers has helped destroy the news biz' credibility while building up its godforsaken profits. (Note that this Sony functionary is devising a second syndicated-hour block of game shows for next year, an admission that the current three may someday retire after all, if they aren't carted out on gurneys.)

Later at a soon-to-be Rong-Aid I came across the latest Philadelphia advertorial -- er, magazine, with a cover come-on about all the wonderful rich people in the area. One could write a pungent and devastating story about how we're turning into a city of the superrich and the superpoor, to gain tax revenues from the former and federal aid for the latter. At the least it should pique a writer's conscience. But this pulp pile didn't become a repository of ads for condos and jewelry and expensive spas by telling the truth, and from that glib city-rag style you know the author probably buried whatever conscience he had and mostly wrote it from no further than two inches from his desk. When Henry Luce hired his legions of lockstep organization men to parrot his prejudices he started a slow-motion death for magazines because one could no longer vouch for their honesty, and forty years after his death his shadow shows no sign of receding.

One thing's clear: Never have media been more hustle-and-bustle -- and never has their product been in such a COMA.